Now that you know that your niche is indeed popular “enough,†you need to know what kind of chances you have to do well in it.
It doesn’t matter much if you have a lot of money to promote your site or not (by paying for traffic). What really matters at this point is whether you’re able to “conquer†your niche in free “organic searchâ€.
[emember_protected for=4-5]
When you understand keyword research – everything else becomes a breeze.
This “conquest†does not mean that you will dominate “all the best keywords†any time soon. It simply means that you must know that you have a good chance of conquering at least a small portion of traffic-yielding as well as profitable keywords.
Traffic Yielding Keywords are:
- Keywords which have at least 100 global/regional average monthly searches (The Google Keyword Planner will tell you that). Some webmasters insist they need to have at least 2000 searches, but if you reach top of page 1 of Google SERPS, even 100 will be pretty good to start! Still, the more the better.
- Keywords whose organic competition (that is, your keyword in “quotes†within the Google Search results) is less than 30,000 – it can be more or less in some instances, but this is the general rule of thumb. Again, you establish this by typing the keyword in quotation marks into Google Search. The stated number of related pages is your “organic competitionâ€.
Profitable Keywords are:
- Just like traffic-yielding keywords… AND
- They’re ALSO “buying†keywords. This means keywords which are typically typed by people who are in a “buying modeâ€. A typical and somewhat simplistic example might be “buy new acid jazz music†or “listen to pop jazzâ€. By “buying†or “commercial intent†we mean not only sufficient interest to make a purchase, but also to take any kind of action, like signing up, etc.
If your research tells you that you have a good number of such keywords, you are now reassured that if you invest your time in developing your site within your target niche, you will have much-better-than-average chances of success, going in.
Let’s now go through some key points when conducting research:
Regardless of what you’re researching (your music niche, a product you wish to promote, etc) here are some general rules you SHOULD adhere to:
- You need to be congruent, that is to personally understand and LIKE this product or service. This is a massive shortcut, believe me! This attitude will give you better insights into the mind of your fans/buyers and it will also help you build-up your site further with supporting articles and other related products. It will also help you establish yourself as an expert in that product or that niche – not “merely†an artist – which will come in handy if you decide to take your site to the next level – a “content†site.
- If you’re researching for a product or service, you need to be SURE that it is of GREAT QUALITY. This will dramatically reduce the rate of returns – and it is always the most ethical way of running any business. This is another critical shortcut. People who sell inferior products rarely, if ever, succeed in any meaningful way. And as an artist, you need to take extra special care here so that your choices don’t make you come across crassly commercial and just in it to make a few bucks!
- You need to KNOW that there is a LARGE market for your particular product. Yet another massive shortcut! Too many marketers get into products which are either too obscure – or too competitive. First establish how big your niche actually is. If your product is something that maybe 10,000 people around the world will like, that’s usually not an ideal product for most marketers, and it will require a different type of promotional approach altogether. You need to establish that SUFFICIENT DEMAND EXISTS for your product before you do anything else. Do this in the following way:
- Type your product name into www.google.com and see how many pages are returned in the results. Now put your product name in quotation marks and see how many competitors are there for it. So it could be Cesar Millan’s Dog Training and “Cesar Millan’s Dog Trainingâ€. Now write both those numbers down. I’ll tell you how to interpret them in a moment.
- Now type your niche name into www.google.com and do the same. So it could be dog training and “dog trainingâ€.
- Now visit www.google.com/trends and check both the product name and the niche name to see whether the trends are good (i.e. either flat-lined or growing)
- Next, visit http://adwords.google.com and log in. Registration is free. Next, drop down the “Tools and Analysis†menu and pick “Keyword Plannerâ€.
- Next click on “Search for new keyword and ad group ideas†and enter both your niche and your product name in the keyword box.
- Now search. Write down the Global results for both the exact and broad matches – and if you’re going to be targeting a narrower market, also write down the Local results. Additionally, hover over the “Competition†field where it says “high†or “low†and you’ll see that there’s actually a number there, e.g. 0.73 or 0.11, etc – write it down. Finally, write down the estimated CPC number (i.e. “suggested bid†per click).
- Next, visit www.spyfu.com and type in first your niche keyword(s), then your product name and write down who is your biggest competitor(s) as well as how much are they paying for those keywords. If there are no competitors for this – you might be wasting your time.
- Next, visit www.quantcast.com and type in the URL of your largest competitor (if in doubt, type your niche or product into Google Search and look at the top listings). Study the resulting demographics carefully and determine the kind of audience your product has. In the example below we took ASPCA as a demographic model, since it has such a large number of visits.
- Now, let’s look at those numbers.
- Niche: dog training
- Broad results: 230,000,000 (Google Search)
- Phrase results (organic competition): 4,410,000
- Product:: Dog Whisperer Cesar Millan
- Broad results: 11,160,000
- Phrase results (organic competition): 1,750,000
- Dog Training (AdWords Keyword Planner)
- Exact competition: 0.92 (92%)
- Exact global searches: 60,500 per month
- Exact local searches: 33,100 per month
- Exact CPC: $1.78
- Trends are slightly downward
- Dog Whisperer Cesar Millan
- Exact competition: 0.17 (17%)
- Exact global searches: 1,000 per month
- Exact local searches: 320 per month
- Exact CPC: $1.34
- Trend is slightly down
- Selected SpyFu data
- CPC: between $1.91 and $2.35
- Advertisers: 98
- Biggest advertiser: Williams Dog Training Company
- Their daily AdWords budget: from $294.71 to $881.12
- Affiliate terms (i.e. are they offering an attractive-enough package to resellers, which you can check by digging through their site and reading their affiliate terms)
- The affiliate program for this product pays out 8% per sale, has a 35-day cookie duration, and transfers money to you once your commissions exceed $25.
- The products included in this promotion vary from books to dog collars, some of these things can cost a few hundred dollars per sale, others only a few.
- A cursory glance (ie. not totally reliable) tells us that an “average†sale will yield about $10 in commissions, although there are higher-yielding products there too.
Use the same kind of thinking and research process for all your products or services including, naturally, anything music-related as well. Below, I’ll now show you the “so what?â€
- The numbers above tell you that the niche “dog training†is a huge niche (with at least 4 million organic competitors (which confirms that many people are interested in it)
- You can also see that approx. 1.7 million pages target this specific product
- But you can see that Google reports, say, 60,500 guaranteed searches for the exact niche term and 8,100 exact searches for the product name. Both numbers are pretty good.
- Were you to only rely solely on AdWords marketing and/or organic Google Search marketing, you could “count on†certain minimum numbers. For example, AdWords ads (known as AdSense) get around 10% of the clicks on page 1 in Google Search, so “dog training†might get you up to 6,050 targeted clicks per month – at a rate of around $2 per click. This would total around $12,000 cost per month, or roughly $400 per day – in line with what SpyFu reports.
- Were you to advertise on AdWords, you would HAVE TO make monthly sales in excess of that cost. Were you to wish to reach the same kind of number of qualified clicks for LESS – you would have to find cheaper (but still GOOD) traffic sources, or alternative (cheaper) keywords.
- Further studying the above numbers, you can see that this product has a steady and reliable sales pattern, but the average per-sale income is relatively low (unless you were to target only the higher-end products with your promotions). And the predicted targeted traffic for this specific product is rather low (around 1000 per month, globally).
- Generally speaking, this kind of a product would probably not be top of my list for promoting – if that was the ONLY thing I intended to do within that niche. This said, you can easily make calculations which might justify promoting a product like this – the only thing is that at such a low per-product profit, you may be waiting a long time before you see significant incomes.
- A site selling a low-yield product like this would have to have additional income sources to have a chance of earning its keep. Promoting this sort of product to a pre-existing LIST which you already own would be the best way to go.
As you study various niches, you’ll discover that there are many which have numbers MUCH higher than in the example above. There are individual products which have more monthly exact searches than the entire above niche. THAT is the kind of secondary product you should focus on at first, to supplement your music business activities.
Later on, once your whole business is ticking along and your member/fan list grows, you may well add other, less-profitable or less popular products to your range, you can diversify and expand.
Remember, as long as the service/product(s) you decide to promote are COMPATIBLE with your music in some way – you’re gonna do just fine!
If you already have a product you’re dedicated to (e.g. you’re already selling something like that at your gigs, t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc – or something even cooler than that), simply run the same tests we described above and see if it’s within “tolerable†limits. If your product or service is “too niche†or “too competitive†you will have to work that much harder to succeed with it. But don’t worry, we’ll cover all that in this course. It’s POSSIBLE to succeed with almost “any†product, if you do it right.
When considering an alternative product to add to your merchandise line,  keep your fans in mind (you know about them by studying your niche more in depth) – what do they find cool enough to pay for?
While we’re still on affiliate products, let’s consider the “ideal†per-unit profit. If you’re affiliated with a physical product (say, via Amazon.com) you’ll typically only get paid between 3% and 10%, so you’ll want to promote higher-end products in order for your commissions to add up quickly enough. If, on the other hand you’re affiliated with an “e-product†(downloadable), and typically less known to wider audiences, your commissions will tend to be much higher (up to as much as 75%) – but selling that will be a lot more difficult than something people already know. Also, high-ticket items are harder to sell than low-end ones.
Sending inexpensive (but good quality) traffic to low-ticket offers often makes sense (if you can get the numbers to add up), but it rarely makes sense with high-end products where your traffic needs to be of top quality – and thus much more expensive. For that, you’ll want to find the highest quality traffic, even if it costs more. We’ll get to that later on.
As a rule of thumb, for a typical affiliate product, you should aim for NO LESS than $25 per sale (earnings to you), but ideally more like $100 or higher. Unless you’re marketing to a pre-existing customer list which you already own and have a great relationship with, in which case it doesn’t matter.
While you will prefer to promote products which have a higher per-unit commission for you, an important exception to this is when it’s a product or service which involves a “continuity modeâ€, i.e. when it involves monthly rebilling. Things add up pretty quickly in those cases.
So, we now KNOW that your supplementary product(s) must be HOT – and this means, not only truly helpful and useful to your fans/buyers, but also sufficiently profitable for you.
An interesting side note here: when promoting products to your fans, it’s often a good strategy to ask them to “buy this to support the bandâ€. No hard sell, just an appeal to their loyalty! If they love the product anyway – they will.
If you’re looking for good sources of products and services where you can earn commissions to supplement your music business, check out the enclosed Affiliate Links Resources page.
[/emember_protected]
 |
 |
 |
| Book 3 – Chapter 8Niche Research |
Course Overview | Book 3 – Chapter 10Your Competition |
Book 3: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, , 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, Overview
Bonuses: templ, lib, tips, kwds, models Link Res: aff, class, cpa, cpv, cpc, write, mob, outs, rss, soc, traff, var, exch, srcs, vid Sub-courses: sens adw, aff, ar, bkm, cpy, cp, fb, fun, goo, lst, loc, mem, opt paid, ppal, sbox, prod, seo, opt, socn, vidm, host, wp, lnch
